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Tagging the Library Catalog

Our latest public catalog has some new features that we are excited to see patrons using. One of these features allows patrons to “tag” items in our catalog. The purpose of adding a tag would be to make an item easier to find. For example, if I ran a book club at the library, I might want to add the tag “EG Book Club” to every title we discuss. That way, any patron searching the catalog for “EG Book Club” would find all of those books grouped together in the results.

The Issue

Recently, we have discovered that there may be some confusion about the nature of tags in our catalog. Given some of the community tags we’ve seen, it appears that patrons believe them to be private. Consider the following example:

Clearly, this is a patron’s note to self and not meant for public consumption. Unfortunately, there is no way we can let the patron who added it know that a more effective way to accomplish this privately would be to use the My List feature of the catalog, which we will outline in a moment.

Other patrons may think tagging an item is a way to communicate with library staff:

I assure you that no staff member will see this unless they find it by accident. If you have created your own tags assuming they were private, please help us clean up the catalog and protect your privacy by deleting them.

My List

If you would like to make personal notes to yourself on items in the catalog, there is a more elegant way to do this. It involves an additional click or two, but there are many more options available to you when you use this method. For example, when you add items to a list, you can request them all at once or one at a time. You can also create multiple lists and organize them as you wish.

You can use “My Lists” to save lists of items that you wish to revisit for later use. The content in these lists is stored until you remove it. In “My Lists”, you can create folders to group your stored titles in ways that help you to organize your content. Titles stored in “My Lists” can be viewed and retrieved by logging into your My Account and using the “My Lists” link. Login to My Account and the search for an item you wish to add to your list. Click on the icon to “Add to cart.”

When you have gathered all of the items for your list in the cart, click on “My Cart” next to your name in the upper right of the screen.

Click “save to list” and either create a new list or save to a list already created and confirm. To see your lists, return to your account details by clicking on your name when logged into the catalog. Select the “My Lists” link to view the lists created. Click on a list name export it or request/delete items on the list.

How would you use the tagging feature in our catalog? Let us know in the comments.